A recent paper by Pereira et al. (2024) published in Science, assessed trends in biodiversity and ecosystem services from historical reconstructions and future scenarios of land-use and climate change (drawing on the scenario framework of the Shared Socio-Economic Pathways (SSP) and Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP)). The authors compared forecasted changes using three different scenarios and compare them with biodiversity changes from 1900 to 2015, combining results from 13 different models.
During the 20th century, biodiversity declined globally by 2 to 11%, as estimated by a range of indicators (0.22-1.1% per decade), a rate of loss 30-120 times higher than the mean extinction rates in the Cenozoic fossil record. Provisioning ecosystem services, such as bioenergy, food, feed, and timber production increased, while regulating services such as coastal resilience, soil protection or pollination decreased. Looking at future trends, biodiversity loss due to land-use changes is expected to be similar or lower than in the 1900-2015 period, however, declines in biodiversity become much higher when climate change is considered, especially in the higher emission scenarios. When both land-use and climate change are considered, biodiversity declines of 0.92 to 5.1% per decade are expected. If greenhouse gas concentrations stabilize and climate change is limited to 2°C, biodiversity declines diminish by 40 to 74% by 2050 compared with the scenario without climate mitigation policy (fossil-fueled development). Most likely, climate change will become a more important driver of terrestrial biodiversity loss than land-use change by mid-century (2050).
Policies have the potential to slow biodiversity loss resulting from land-use change and demand for provisioning services. However, at the same time climate change impacts need to be kept to a minimum.
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